Marocco: Muddling through the Middle Atlas

Marocco:

Muddling through the Middle Atlas

The rain begins in the afternoon, when I am still several hours away from Azrou, a market town in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains. Each time the highway crosses a riverbed, I steal a glance over the side of the bridge.

By PETER W. FONG

What I see makes me anxious: bare gravel where no water has flowed for months, then gray ribbons of silt and, finally, a red-brown torrent. Although these are not the rivers I am planning to fish, the despair begins anyway. How can this be happening, I think, on my first trip? Not my first trip ever, of course, or even my first attempt at finding trout where no trout should reasonably be found. But, strangely enough, my first dedicated trout-fishing excursion in a country that I have called home since 2015.

When I was younger (thirty-something) and my wife and I were living on a Montana public school teacher’s salary (hers), I imagined myself a philosopher. And this was my creed: frequent and casual. Meaning that outdoor pursuits—fishing, hiking, hunting, skiing, and so on—should not be the stuff of expeditions. This was an easy code to live by at our house, where multiple trout streams and trailheads were several miles closer to home than the nearest supermarket. I would often hunt ducks at sunrise, before retreating to the office, or take our daughter with me to the river after picking her up from school.

SUNRISE TO SUNSET

I arrive at the hotel under a dark shroud of fog and cloud. But my mood lightens when the desk clerk asks, “Would you like breakfast now?”

The meal begins with harira, a fragrant and savory soup of chickpeas, tomatoes, and spices whose name derives from the Arabic word for “silk.” This is accompanied by a meatball tajine, onion flatbread, two round white pan breads (bigger than an English muffin, with a dense, close crumb), butter, jam, yogurt, sweetened mint tea, and a plate of honeyed cookies.

Also a Moroccan skillet pie called pastilla, typically chicken, onions, and almonds seasoned with cinnamon and saffron (among other things) and wrapped in thin layers of crisp pastry. But this pastilla is not the traditional round shape served in Tangier—it is oblong instead, like a burrito.

Although called “breakfast,” this is not my morning meal because, during the holy month of Ramadan, one breaks the fast in the evening. From sunrise to sunset, observant Muslims will neither eat nor drink. Not even a sip of water.

GETTING THE FISHING PERMIT

In the morning, with the sky newly clear, I can see white storks ferrying twigs from the hillside to their nests atop nearby chimneys. In the distance, I can hear the impatient braying of a donkey. Not ten paces from where I parked the car, a cascade of wisteria falls in lavender profusion from an upper balcony.

My new friend Karim Boutellaka walks to the hotel from his apartment, carrying his camping gear, fly rod, and camera.

He is thirty-six, married with two children, and one of the very few licensed tourist guides in Morocco who also happens to flyfish.

To obtain my fishing permit, we drive to the Centre Nationale d’Hydrobiologie et de Pisciculture, site of Morocco’s first trout hatchery, established in 1924, during the French colonial era. Since 2006, the center has been systematically attempting to bolster Morocco’s populations of native trout, whose numbers have been battered by warming temperatures and persistent drought.

Because the official who must stamp the license with the required seals (one red, one blue) has not yet arrived, Karim and I visit with the chief engineer for sportfishing, whose office walls are decorated with larger-than-life-size prints of himself holding fine specimens of largemouth bass, northern pike, and rainbow trout—three of Morocco’s more popular introduced species.

After the paperwork has been completed, we drive past fields of bright red poppies while Berber children wave from the roadside, some with enthusiasm, some forlornly. (Due to the combined effects of Ramadan and the pandemic, the tourist traffic this spring is much diminished.) Karim explains that, because of yesterday’s rainfall, our original plan is no longer advisable. We had hoped to hike into the canyon of the Fellat, home of a remnant strain of endemic brown trout, but his friends there say that the river is blown out.

PROSPECTING AT HIGH ALTITUDE

We could visit a local reservoir for stocked rainbows—large fish, he notes, with a reputation for finickiness—or else do a little touring while we wait for the muddy flows to subside. Since many of the streams in this region arise from springs, it’s possible that we could find fishable water by prospecting higher in each drainage.

I ponder a moment before replying, distracted by the familiar sight of green meadows and rocky hillsides dotted with conifers. Our elevation is about 5000 feet, roughly the same as that in Gardiner, Montana, on the northern boundary of Yellowstone Park. But our latitude is much farther south, on par with Phoenix, Arizona. So while some things feel familiar, others seem odd when juxtaposed, potentially, with trout: silvery-leaved olive trees, head-high prickly pears, young men in djellabas tending flocks of wiry goats.

“Let’s prospect,” I say, wanting to see more of this landscape.

First stop, the Chbouka, a rivulet that drains a spring-fed bog. The water is stained but not murky, and we can clearly see Saharan pond turtles a foot below the surface, grazing on beds of aquatic plants. From a distance, the dimple created by the brief emergence of a turtle’s snout looks a lot like the remnant of a trout’s rise. At least to my eyes. Accordingly, I tie on a small elk-hair caddis, but Karim shakes his head. Here the fish are shy, he says. They prefer fast water and will hold tight to cover, such as larger rocks and undercut banks.

He recommends a small, weighted nymph, high-sticked on a tight line. So I replace the caddis with a beadhead pheasant tail.

After waiting six years to dampen my four-weight in Morocco, I don’t mind that no fish emerge from the first few holes, each no bigger than a bathtub. It feels good just to be near moving water, wearing waders, grasping cork. When a lesser kestrel hovers above me, I watch gratefully before continuing downstream, around the next bend, where the muddy bank is pocked with the tracks of sheep, goats, and cattle.

FISH CLOSE TO STRUCTURE

When the first strike comes, I lift the rod out of habit more than real awareness. As Karim predicted, the fish was laying close to structure: a knee-deep bank thick with reeds. It flashes in the light, showing a flank so silvery that, for a moment, I think it’s a rainbow. But no—it’s definitely a brown, barely as long as my hand, with bluish-black parr marks and faint brick-colored spots. Because the Chbouka’s waters were

augmented by stocking from Azrou in 2008, it’s hard to know what percentage of the river’s original DNA is present in this fish. But it was undoubtedly born here and looks very different from the brown trout I’ve encountered elsewhere in my travels. According to the American Fisheries Society’s Trout and Char of the World, it is most likely Salmo macrostigma, the least threatened of Morocco’s endemic trout.

At the first diversion dam, we turn around and head back upstream, where Karim extracts a slightly bigger brown from a narrow run that I’d dismissed as too shallow to hold fish. When we reach the bridge that marks the limit of the legal zone, we can see a young man fishing with a cane pole and bobber, fifty yards upstream, in the closed area. Karim asks if he has caught any trout. “There’s no trout here,” the man replies, then turns his gaze back toward the bobber.

As comforting as the mountain air With the end of Ramadan still two weeks away, Karim says he is not hungry.

But I am—especially when I learn that Karim’s wife has made me a box of finger sandwiches, each the diameter of a tippet spool, stuffed with a mixture of chopped tomatoes, corn, and freshly harvested morel mushrooms. Hunting for morels had been a beloved family pastime in Montana, an activity intimately associated with our son’s May birthday and the coming of spring. Though my wife and I have never prepared them in this fashion, the taste is as comforting as the mountain air.

After lunch, we move on to the Oum Er-Rbia or “mother of springtime,” a more substantial stream that literally springs from the bedrock of the Middle Atlas. Its headwaters emerge from dozens of clefts in the limestone and dolomite, gathering volume until the river becomes too big and fast to wade across.

Along the way, we pass Berber shepherds driving their flocks of sheep and goats along the potholed road. The ancient houses, raised by hand, one stone at a time, are now sliding back toward the earth. Each structure looks like a rockpile that happened to fall into the shape of a room, topped with rusty sheets of corrugated metal, precariously secured against the wind with more rock. Near the little village at the river’s source, a rabble of boys plays soccer with a cricket ball, using a pair of stones to mark the boundaries of each goal.

On the far side of the river is an aquaculture facility operated by a company owned by Morocco’s king, Mohammed IV. The fish it raises are processed like European smoked salmon and can be purchased in supermarkets as far away as Tangier.

The near side, however, and both banks proceeding upstream, are lined with makeshift tea houses, built of tree limbs and bamboo, sheathed with equal parts of plastic and thatch. On a normal weekend, Karim says, this place would be filled with tourists from nearby Khenifra and other cities. It’s the need to fast that’s keeping things quiet now. That and the coronavirus pandemic, with its attendant curfew and travel restrictions.

HOUSE ON HILLSIDE

Because the sun is nearing the ridgeline, we decide to postpone fishing until tomorrow and look for a place to spend the night. One of Karim’s acquaintances is building a house on a hillside overlooking the valley. The dirt access road is so steep that the rental car requires multiple attempts to make the ascent. When we finally park, I notice that the right front tire seems low on air but am too impressed with the lambent walls of the nearby mountain—and too eager for the evening meal—to pay it much attention.

In the morning, however, it’s apparent that the right rear tire is losing air faster than the right front, perhaps a consequence of our journey up the dirt incline, spitting mud and gravel, the initial leg in first gear and the next in reverse, as the switchback was too sharp and tight to negotiate with the steering wheel.

By the time we descend to the riverside parking area, perhaps 200 yards away, the rear tire is well and truly flat. But we are lucky—there’s a spare in a cradle beneath the undercarriage, fully inflated.

Once the tire has been changed, I observe that the Oum Er-Rbia hosts several spin fishermen in hip boots or waders. Karim says that they are all hoping to connect with one of Azrou’s hatchery rainbows, stocked a few weeks earlier, just before the season opener. On the opposite bank, two enterprising anglers are trying a different strategy: using long, telescoping rods, they dunk their baited hooks in the the outflow from the king’s rearing pens.

Around midday Karim gets a phone call. His friends on the Fellat report that the river level is dropping quickly and already fishable. I take a deep breath and wind in my line. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Like the Chbouka, the Fellat was a target of the national augmentation plan, receiving deliveries of native browns from 2006 to 2008. Judging from an hour or two of daydreaming on Google Earth, however, the Fellat is much larger and protected by a deep canyon, something like the upper forks of Montana’s Boulder River.

We drive to the farthest upstream bridge to meet Karim’s friend Ali, who has ridden down from his home in the canyon on a gray mule. After loading our gear into the animal’s packbaskets, we stash the car at yet another friend’s house (Karim knows everyone around here) then don our waders.

OUTERUTILAZATION

The lower reaches of the Fellat bear the typical marks of overutilization: a staircase of diversion dams made of rock and woven plastic cloth, a network of concrete irrigation channels, and a dwindling mainstem. As we hike upstream, however, the landscape becomes steeper and stonier— less conducive to cultivation. A few hundred yards upstream of the last dam, we discover a handful of morels along the brushy edge of a bankside meadow. Soon after, we encounter two local anglers, fishing with earthworms and split-shot. Karim stops to exchange pleasantries and also to impart some crucial information. According to the most recent government regulations for the Fellat, any brown trout “whatever its size, must be immediately returned, free and alive, to the water in the same place where it was caught.”

I can hear the men laughing as I continue upstream, but the sound of water soon drowns out their conversation. I can’t fail to recognize that all of the ingredients for local extinction of wild trout exist here: poaching, dewatering, overgrazing, hatchery stocking programs, nonnative species introduction. Nevertheless, I feel hopeful.

Something about seeing the morels has quickened my steps and lengthened my stride. Though no more mushrooms appear at my feet, I begin to notice small springs seeping from the hillside, green beds of aquatic vegetation, Saharan frogs—with a distinctive green stripe along their backs—and algae-covered stones well-populated with the protective cases of caddis larvae.

IN THE MIDDLE OF A CADDIS HATCH

Before I know it, I’m climbing over boulders the size of garden sheds, then following a goat path to the rim of the canyon, where I can see for many miles to the west. As the sun approaches the horizon, I hear the goats themselves. They clatter in noisy groups down the trail to a rickety bridge—an unexpectedly picturesque structure of mismatched boards. If I can beat them there, I think, their silhouettes against the canyon wall, lit by the late afternoon sun, will make a great picture.

That’s when my phone rings. It’s Karim, of course, wondering where I am. He is standing in the middle of a caddis hatch—and the fish are taking dries. I sigh. Did I really drive all this way, I think, just to look at goats? But it’s too late for regrets now. I’ve already broken the only rule that matters: If you don’t know the water, don’t leave your guide. Eventually Karim and I rendezvous at the goats’ destination: Ali’s homestead on the far bank of the river. We shed our waders and stoop to enter a low doorway into the kitchen. The room is large and sparsely furnished, with walls of smooth cement topped by a lean-to roof. The family congregates around the woodstove, Ali reclining on the left, his wife Meriem tending a soup pot on the right, their adult son Moulay perched on a stool close by, watching a soccer match on his phone. It is Moulay who has painted at least two walls—one inside, one out—with images of trout. A shy cat ignores my greeting and retreats to the stove as well, then closes its eyes and stretches out against Ali. I sit down on a pile of Berber carpets and close my eyes too. Still to come are the ritual breaking of the fast, a sky replete with stars, and then the easy rest that comes with a cold night in a warm sleeping bag.

COMICALLY ENTHUSIASTIC STRIKES

In the morning, Karim will guide me farther up the canyon, where we will see nary a caddis fly. At the plunge pool of a waterfall perhaps 50 feet high, he will mention that the Fellat also contains an endemic species of barbel, a member of the carp family. When we turn downstream, I will knot on a size-14 muddler minnow and twitch it across the current, like a wounded barbel fry.

The strikes will be comically enthusiastic, the aggression all out of proportion with the length of the trout. By then, of course, my youthful philosophy will seem comical too. Whatever, I will tell myself. Life has borne me far from the time when I thought I knew something about life. If not frequent and casual, then I will make do with expeditions. Wherever, whenever.